Thursday, November 08, 2018

Peaceful Reading :: A Month in the Country ~ J.L.Carr

Another peaceful read...

I've recently helped establish a new book group that has started to meet in the church that we can see from our home. This village has no meeting place and so our new churchwarden is injecting a new lease of life into the building with an art group (Bookhound has joined) and various other groups and events.

I love to open the bedroom curtains to this view in the winter...

and this view in summer...

Not our parish, but as we are right on the boundary this our nearest church. I walk across there a lot and it is a church I have written about often here and which I love.

Small in size thanks to a rebuild after a disastrous lightning strike and fire in 1956 which decimated all but the fifteenth century tower...

St Mary's a church that always reminds me of the one in George Eliot's Adam Bede.

We are running the book group on a monthly theme rather than a set book, and for 'The Village' I decided to read (for the umpteenth time) A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr.

As soon as I open the book my spirits soar because I know I am in for something special, Oxgodby in 1920, and each time I read that 'something special' will be something different.

I first wrote this about the book here in 2006 ...

'War veteran Tom Birkin reflects, almost 60 years later, on the summer of 1920 he spent uncovering a medieval wall painting on the wall of a village church.He sleeps just below the belfry and spends his days high up on the scaffolding inside the church. Meanwhile outside another war veteran, Moon, is digging in the church grounds for some archaeological remains.

There were real and very obvious analogies for me of Tom reaching to the heavens for the healing he was searching for after the grimness of the war, and Moon conversely digging in the opposite direction and so much more.It is a reflection on times and loves lost.

"We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever....they've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass" says Carr's narrator towards the end of his account.

Was there ever a more realistic description of grief in so few words?

In her introduction Penelope Fitzgerald adds her own thoughts...

"The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one's own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life, life will not conform"

She was the wisest of women and J.L.Carr most certainly a writer with the "magic touch to re-enter the imagined past".

This time around my mind was focused on that summer we have just had and so like the one that J.L. Carr describes...

The contrast between the bucolic idyll that village life seemed to be (though of course in reality far from) comes in stark comparison to the horrors of war. This is the country that Birkin and Moon fought for and the village knows it. The debt to these survivors of the trenches is in part repaid with acceptance and kindness, with shelter and work, hospitality and inclusion. It was all the more poignant to sit and talk about the book (by chance chosen by two of us) in a church that must resemble the one that features in the book, and in the run up to the forthcoming Armistice commemoration.

On the evening of November 11th, Peter, one of our number, will (or maybe because the weather forecast is terrible) be playing Last Post from the top of the church tower before nipping down to the belfry to join the ringers. Throughout the day bells with ring out across the country to mark the 100th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities, and St Mary's, with its tower of five bells, will be joining in the great peal. In Tavistock there will be a half muffled peal followed by a full peal of over 5000 changes...for the campanologists out there this will be of the method known as Grandsire Caters, apparently one of the oldest of all ringing methods, which will last for three hours from 2.30pm.

Meanwhile I would rate A Month in the Country as one of my top ten essential reads. Now I've said that I'm wondering what the other nine might be... any suggestions...

Comments

Peaceful Reading :: A Month in the Country ~ J.L.Carr

Another peaceful read...

I've recently helped establish a new book group that has started to meet in the church that we can see from our home. This village has no meeting place and so our new churchwarden is injecting a new lease of life into the building with an art group (Bookhound has joined) and various other groups and events.

I love to open the bedroom curtains to this view in the winter...

and this view in summer...

Not our parish, but as we are right on the boundary this our nearest church. I walk across there a lot and it is a church I have written about often here and which I love.

Small in size thanks to a rebuild after a disastrous lightning strike and fire in 1956 which decimated all but the fifteenth century tower...

St Mary's a church that always reminds me of the one in George Eliot's Adam Bede.

We are running the book group on a monthly theme rather than a set book, and for 'The Village' I decided to read (for the umpteenth time) A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr.

As soon as I open the book my spirits soar because I know I am in for something special, Oxgodby in 1920, and each time I read that 'something special' will be something different.

I first wrote this about the book here in 2006 ...

'War veteran Tom Birkin reflects, almost 60 years later, on the summer of 1920 he spent uncovering a medieval wall painting on the wall of a village church.He sleeps just below the belfry and spends his days high up on the scaffolding inside the church. Meanwhile outside another war veteran, Moon, is digging in the church grounds for some archaeological remains.

There were real and very obvious analogies for me of Tom reaching to the heavens for the healing he was searching for after the grimness of the war, and Moon conversely digging in the opposite direction and so much more.It is a reflection on times and loves lost.

"We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever....they've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass" says Carr's narrator towards the end of his account.

Was there ever a more realistic description of grief in so few words?

In her introduction Penelope Fitzgerald adds her own thoughts...

"The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one's own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life, life will not conform"

She was the wisest of women and J.L.Carr most certainly a writer with the "magic touch to re-enter the imagined past".

This time around my mind was focused on that summer we have just had and so like the one that J.L. Carr describes...

The contrast between the bucolic idyll that village life seemed to be (though of course in reality far from) comes in stark comparison to the horrors of war. This is the country that Birkin and Moon fought for and the village knows it. The debt to these survivors of the trenches is in part repaid with acceptance and kindness, with shelter and work, hospitality and inclusion. It was all the more poignant to sit and talk about the book (by chance chosen by two of us) in a church that must resemble the one that features in the book, and in the run up to the forthcoming Armistice commemoration.

On the evening of November 11th, Peter, one of our number, will (or maybe because the weather forecast is terrible) be playing Last Post from the top of the church tower before nipping down to the belfry to join the ringers. Throughout the day bells with ring out across the country to mark the 100th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities, and St Mary's, with its tower of five bells, will be joining in the great peal. In Tavistock there will be a half muffled peal followed by a full peal of over 5000 changes...for the campanologists out there this will be of the method known as Grandsire Caters, apparently one of the oldest of all ringing methods, which will last for three hours from 2.30pm.

Meanwhile I would rate A Month in the Country as one of my top ten essential reads. Now I've said that I'm wondering what the other nine might be... any suggestions...

Constants...

Team Tolstoy

Team TolstoyA year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010.
Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book.

Team Tolstoy BookmarkDon't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?
An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.

Port Eliot Festival

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